Content is increasingly being distributed in electronic form to an array of users for use on computing devices. Content may include traditional media such as books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, manuals, guides, references, articles, reports, and documents. The content may exist in print and/or in electronic form, or may be transformed from print to an electronic form through the use of a scanning device. The Internet, in particular, has facilitated a wide publication of digital content through downloading and displaying of images of content. Additionally, as more content is transformed from print to electronic form, more images of content are becoming available online. In some instances, a page image allows a reader to view a page of content as it would appear in print.
Some users may have computing devices with displays that are sized differently from the display for which an image is originally formatted. Also, some users may wish to view the content in an image in a varyingly-sized window within a display. To accommodate these different viewing preferences, content providers have developed techniques for reformatting images of text to display appropriately at different sizes. However, many of these approaches are designed for English or other Western languages.
East Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are more complex than many Western languages. East Asian languages may have different character classes including logograms, multiple writing modes (i.e., vertical and horizontal), and numerous text layout rules that specify formatting and composition of text. Publishers of physical books may use sophisticated page-layout software to address these various rules and format pages of text in a book (or other printed material) to provide a good reading experience. However, these layout techniques are designed primarily to format text for a printed page and are poorly adapted for reformatting text to display on varyingly-sized windows of electronic devices.